Researchers explore naval diet during Napoleonic wars

Napoleon famously said an army marches on its stomach, but it has always been assumed that the British navy fought him on a disgusting diet of weevil-filled biscuits while the men's teeth dropped out from scurvy.

In fact, the food in the Royal Navy was rather good during the Napoleonic wars and a key factor in its success, according to historians at the University of Greenwich.

In consigning another myth to the dustbin of history, they hope to explore for the first time how the Royal Navy provided 140,000 men each year with hundreds of tonnes of meat, wheat, biscuits, flour and fruit - not to mention beer, rum and spirits - in far-flung locations during the longest and most complicated period of war in British history.

The work of the navy's victualling board and its suppliers was such a success that in the period of the Napoleonic wars the death rate from disease at sea fell from one in 42 men in the 1770s to one in 143 men by 1813.

Greenwich University - housed appropriately in the Old Royal Naval College - and the National Maritime museum have been granted nearly £200,000 by the Leverhulme Trust for a three-year programme of research into a mass of unseen documents.

Roger Knight, professor of naval history from the university's Greenwich Maritime Institute and author of this year's biography of Nelson, The Pursuit of Victory, said: "The mass feeding of men was an unqualified success for the Royal Navy, one of the reasons it triumphed over the navies of France and Spain."

He added: "Far from surviving on weevil-filled biscuits, hundreds of thousands of men received a carefully planned diet of food and drink, wherever they were in the world. But little is known about the contractors that supplied food, some of whom were MPs, millionaires or even, by today's standards, billionaires, and the industries which sprang into action.

"The navy was powered by huge amounts of men and the success of the victualling operation determined the success of the navy."

Prof Knight argues that tales of weevil-ridden biscuits were much exaggerated, in many cases by Victorian historians, who tended to base their criticism of the victualling system on seamen's accounts of the general conditions at sea.

Nelson was passionately committed to ensuring that his men were properly catered for, personally requesting the correct supplies. In fact all of the most celebrated admirals cared very much about the diet of the crew, as their success depended on it.

The research will also explore the impact the supply chain had on local areas and regions, looking at the slaughterhouses of Deptford and Tower Hill in London, which employed hundreds of people to supply the navy with meat, the breweries of Plymouth and Portsmouth, which supplied beer to the fleet (and whose archives will also be examined) and the naval depots of Falmouth, Leith, Yarmouth and Glasgow, which were supplied by local businesses and contractors.